Utopia
"If history teaches us anything it is that change never starts in the center. .... it always starts on the fringes with people who are first dismissed as crazy and unreasonable and ridiculous." -Rutger Bregman
Islands and other sorts of isolated places are often the settings for utopian dreams, and paddling across the sea to one is a good way to delve into the universal yearning for a better way to live as a society.
Launching from the tide flats of Kopachuck State Park, my paddle bit into the placid waters of Carr Inlet as I began the crossing to Cutts Island. Rhythmically pushing the blades through the water, I was soon centered in my thoughts.
Carr Inlet is one of the many sinuous waterways of southern Puget Sound; its 300-foot depths were plumbed in the waning days of the great glaciation that forged so much of western Washington's geomorphology. Rapidly melting ice thousands of feet thick drained into a frigid labyrinth of tunnels which eventually discharged under high pressure beneath and around the deflating ice cap like an otherworldly firehose. The resulting subglacial glaciofluvial scour carved the patterns that would eventually fill with rising sea waters flooding into the newly released land. Diminutive Cutts Island stands above that water, it's madrone-topped surface bounded by cliffs of glacial debris. Attractive in its aloofness, it is easy to agree with conservation biologist Alex Bond's observation: Islands are still the domain of the explorers, the adventurers, the discoverers.
Cutts Island's place in Carr Inlet is fraught with significance, as it sits just a short distance from the site of one of the most intriguing utopian social experiments that has occurred in Washington--Home Colony.
Home Colony was started by three visionaries--George Allen, Oliver Verity and B.F. O'Dell--who, like me, set out paddling across the water, looking for enlightenment. They purchased 26 acres across from Cutts Island for $182 (less than $5,000 adjusted to 2019) in the summer of 1895. In 1898 they incorporated the Mutual Home Association for "members in obtaining and building homes for themselves and to aid in establishing better moral and social conditions.”
The Mutual Home Association established a model of community home ownership followed today by many Community Land Trusts (CLT)--that is, land held in trust, with individual homes owned by their residents, a model not so different from the land tenure traditions of the Salish nations. The land trust model extends ownership opportunities across a wider income spectrum, often diminishing the all-to-common displacement effects of a developing community as well as creating a wealth-building pathway for people of limited means. I had the good fortune to participate in the successes and challenges of the Lopez Community Land Trust, Washington's first modern CLT, a couple of decades ago.
Home Colony stood in stark contrast to the pattern of land ownership developing elsewhere in Washington Territory. With ratification of the 1855 treaties with Native Americans, the US Government claimed ownership of most land in Washington, and developed a system for its transfer to settlers and other private owners. A Surveyor General was appointed to oversee the orderly ground survey of the territory into one-square-mile sections grouped in 36-square-mile townships, a process begun with the United States' first land disposal system, the Land Ordinance of 1785 written by Thomas Jefferson.
The land occupied later by Home Colony was acquired from the US Government under terms of the Homestead Act by Henry Hulsman, who received the patent to 64 acres in February, 1889. Cutts Island was acquired from the US Government in an 1891 Cash Entry Patent by Carl Lorenz (he paid $6.88 to the US Treasury), a ship builder based near today's Penrose Point State Park, famed for his many boats in the "mosquito fleet" serving communities on Puget Sound. Cutts Island returned to public ownership in 1969 when the island and adjoining tidelands was purchased by the Parks and Recreation Commission for $42,000.
US land laws sanctioned transfers of up to 160 acres to single men or 320 acres to married couples, creating a pathway to legacy wealth for a limited number of settlers. In contrast, Home Colony was based on the belief that 2 acres was sufficient for a family to provide home and sustenance. Members worked cooperatively to construct their houses, gardens and orchards, with many shared meals, dances and lectures at the colony's community center, Liberty Hall.
The overarching principles upon which the intentional community was founded, its "utopian" charter, mirrored the ideals of the anarchist movement of the time, as stated by Emma Goldman:
Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.
Specific policies promoted by the movement included support for the rights of workers to unionize for humane working conditions, gender and racial equality, contraception, and the right to love whomever a person chooses. The movement was largely a reaction to the dehumanizing features of the emerging capitalist state.
The values on which Home Colony was founded seem unremarkable to us today, but the colony was viewed with suspicion at the turn of the 20th century, and those suspicions and prejudices leaned toward violence after the assassination of President McKinley by an avowed anarchist in 1901. A group of vigilantes from Tacoma chartered the steamer Typhoon with Ed Lorenz (Carl's brother) as captain to take them to Home Colony to burn it to the ground. Residents, alerted, assembled a bounteous potluck for the uninvited guests, but Ed, wishing to avoid a confrontation, encountered "engine trouble" a short way from port, and kept the vigilantes marooned at sea until their tempers cooled, at which time he returned them to their homes.
Home Colony also gained notoriety as the home of The Agitator, a newspaper with a nationwide circulation edited by Jay Fox, an anarchist from Chicago drawn to the idealistic colony that would remain his home until his death in 1961. A fierce proponent of free speech rights, Jay Fox and his Agitator would factor in local and national debates about the rights of citizens in a free society. Arrested for printing a story about a disagreement between community members regarding skinny-dipping in the chilly waters of Carr Inlet (he violated a statute making it a misdemeanor to "encourage or advocate disrespect for the law"), he fought the conviction all the way to the US Supreme Court and lost, but was ultimately pardoned by Washington Governor Ernest Lister.
In Trying Home, author Justin Wadland examines the legacy of Home Colony and its place in the progress of human beings toward a better future:
Utopia posits the radical notion that through our ingenuity and imagination we might create a new and better way of organizing ourselves. The founders and the participants in Home dared to consider a different way of relating to each other, and in doing so created a little bubble of the future on the backwaters of Puget Sound.
In our day, striving for a new and better way continues. The "utopian" ideals to yearn for--ethics in government, business and our relationships with each other and the earth which sustains life, equity for all people to share in the benefits and opportunities of our society, and the empathy to guide our understanding of the process to realize these goals-- are being addressed by the best minds of our generation. I believe that the Green New Deal framework codifies the urgency and the general outlines of this path.
Lobbying the 2019 Washington State Legislature in Olympia, I witnessed the earnest hard work of our citizen lawmakers as they forged new beginnings in the form of 485 pieces of legislation, making steps towards the foundation of a new vision of utopia. Bloggers of the 22nd century will undoubtedly point to these efforts and experiments as the Home Colony of our day.
It was time to paddle back all too soon. As the sun-dappled waves bobbed the kayak along I was filled with a peaceful hope that the tribulations of today's backward-looking federal politics and its attendant corruption and dishonesty will, with the sustained effort of dedicated people, give way to renewed progress toward the better possibilities that we humans most certainly are capable of reaching.
--David
